


Pygmalion and His Paper Pinocchio

by stultiloquent



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Depressing, M/M, Pygmalion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-12
Updated: 2013-07-12
Packaged: 2017-12-19 05:27:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/879960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stultiloquent/pseuds/stultiloquent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Sometimes he thinks he will be one of those people that everybody knows but won’t remember, and eventually he will have just stumbled his way out of life and out of everybody’s minds.</em><br/>AU, where MCR never happened and Gerard is a chief creative officer tired of life. What happens when he dreams of a guy he’s never met before?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pygmalion and His Paper Pinocchio

**Author's Note:**

> Depressing story. I kind of screwed up the ending but I’ve tried my best to edit it? Whatever, this is my first Frerard, don't I get an excuse for letting the story become progressively lame?
> 
> Just kidding. Truth is I've never really written in this style before so that may explain any awkward bits. The story is actually pretty self-explanatory if you look at the title, but you're always welcome to interpret it in any way you want!
> 
> Another thing is I actually know shit all about Chief Creative Officers so please don't hate me for getting things wrong.
> 
> And can I just take a moment to say that Frank's characterisation was greatly influenced by dear_monday's "Kiss Me Now, You'll Catch Your Death". Seriously, if you ever come across this fic - I LOVE your writing. Thank you so much for writing that story.
> 
> Oh and con.crit = love. Seriously, I need it.
> 
> As usual, cross-posted on dA.
> 
> Oh and I almost forgot -  
> Disclaimer: Don't own, never happened, blah blah blah.

He was a dreamer. A writer, an artist, a child prodigy.

But he is nobody.

 

* *

 

“Thanks for coming.” “Leaving already? Tell your brother I said hi.” “Well guess I’ll see you on Monday!”

All the voices blur into one as the night grows older, until he can no longer tell these familiar faces apart from one another, all blending into nothing but one friendly countenance that could’ve been stranger than a stranger’s. There’s a vague enquiry about his wellbeing, but he can’t tell if it’s genuine or out of common courtesy either, so he just vaguely shakes his head and turns his back on them before he unravels at the seams of his thousand-dollar shirt. He turns around and, as he enters his apartment, his sanctuary, his own smile crumbles, ebbs into nothing but sombre and fatigue.

The lifeless shuffling of feet against the stone-cold floorboards, the haphazard clang of keys being tossed onto the dining table, the dull sound that echoes through the kitchen as the coffee pot is turned on – they’re all routine and nothing more. It’s also routine that he sits down at the dining table – a table for two, quite ironically – with a single mug of coffee and sips at it – in the slightest of a trance, but always unhappy. He is nobody and has nobody to look at but his own shadow on the wall, the only being that will ever occupy the other end of his dining table for two, and he thinks he can almost hear it answer him by now.

But he himself remains wordless as he takes another sip from his coffee mug. He knows the silence like a best friend.

 

* *

 

Monday taps him on the shoulder a little too enthusiastically for his taste, and he drags himself across the city to work. A lot of people think he’s pretty accomplished for a 30 year-old, already one of the higher-ranking managers at an established multi-national firm. _Gerard A. Way, Chief Creative Officer_ is his title, and if anybody would actually stop for a minute and look closer they would have found the irony alarmingly amusing.

It’s hardly creative if it’s only a regurgitation of what everybody wants to see, what everybody wants to hear. He’s as much a product of the masses as they are of themselves.

But in a world where everybody’s busy directing their own lives, where it all intersects, they only care see a young Chief Creative Officer. And that’s all they see, that’s all they think, that wealth equals power, power equals happiness. Gerard would scoff too if he could.

So right now, as he sits through another PowerPoint meeting with his little tumbler of coffee the secretary brewed for him (his only comfort, like a safety blanket amidst sharp grey edges), all he wants is to dig a hole through the storeys of the building and sleep until it’s over. He doesn’t really know what he is doing with his life.

Sometimes he thinks he will be one of those people that everybody knows but won’t remember, and eventually he will have just stumbled his way out of life and out of everybody’s minds.

 

* *

 

His brother likes to leave messages on his phone sometimes to remind him that he’s not as alone as he thinks he is in a sea of white-collars.

“Hey Gee, it’s Mikey. Mom’s made soup again; I put it in your fridge while you were out. Love you.”

Like a lifeboat, keeping him alive sometimes when he thinks he will drown successfully this time around. On some days he’s better, and it makes him crack a smile. They never last for more than 24 hours, although it’s nice to know that somebody still cares, still thinks of him of their own volition.

There are not many people like Mikey left in this world.

 

* *

 

Sometimes he will sit in the middle of his living room and just stare at the blank walls like ordinary people stare at moving pictures in a black box. But the walls, they hold nothing on them; no fixtures, no paintings, no photos of anyone. (The only photos he owns are those of his family, five in total and all fossilised memories in his room.) There are no colourful promises crawling all over these walls. There were days when his walls were still filled with his own paintings, with random lyrics and words scribbled in between the pieces with sharpie to colour in any empty space. He’d had a taste of happiness in that dimly-lit room. But they were left behind in the old room, gone with the move into the new apartment in the city, and sometimes he feels cheated, like somebody had robbed him blind of his inspiration and his desire to live. It wasn’t really anybody specific who did the robbing; just his job.

Eight years, and he still hasn’t carved a home out of his apartment.

Almost once a month, he will get a little shock, a little like a realisation looking at his life, and he will lie awake in his bed. And, like always, he will wish for the Muses as he stares up at the ceiling.

 

* *

 

He had a girlfriend once upon a time. He doesn’t really remember what happened, why they broke up. Truth be told, he doesn’t really recall her face, just the fact that she liked to wear red lipstick and had left lipstick stains somewhere in his mind, and he hasn’t been able to wash them away since. He does remember that he wasn’t really in love, and that she disappeared with another man she claimed to be head over heels for.

He doesn’t miss her – she was merely one in a million – but it makes him question his maker if he was built to be sad and alone.

 

* *

 

His brother has a girlfriend, is the problem. Gerard never really gets jealous or resent the girl, but once in a while Mikey will prod at Gerard’s shoulder in jest as if to say, get your own girlfriend. But Gerard’s seen stranger faces among people he supposedly knows. He’s learned to hear cacophony meaningless as traffic noises in a room full of conversations, and he’s come to realise he’ll never not be alone. He has too little faith left to believe in relationships.

Perhaps that’s his biggest fatality, but if it’s in his nature, he’ll gladly remain living with only shadows for friends. Familiarity is a blanket he likes to wrap around himself, and shadows are preciously predictable creatures.

 

* *

 

But it’s terrifying and exhilarating at the same time when his routine breaks. For the first time in years, he dreams. He dreams in colour.

When he wakes with a start, what little memory of the dream he carries with him over to reality stays with him and haunts him for the rest of the day. The dream was of somebody he had never met. A flash of ivory skin reminiscent that of a doll’s, a pair of lips quirked in a cheeky smile, a cute button nose, a glimmer of vivid golden eyes; they will remain stapled to his every thought until he finds out the identity of the person. For the first time in years he finally feels the ghosts of a familiar itch in his fingers, and in a state of barely-there consciousness, he’s putting to paper a quick ballpoint sketch of the face while it’s still fresh in his mind. The sketch is very undignified and barely captures, let alone communicates, the air of mischief that person carried, but it’s a sketch nonetheless. Staring at the lines of ink, Gerard thinks he finally feels something shift in his hollow chest.

It feels like a glimpse of plum petals in the bleak whiteness of winter. It feels like the beginnings of something very much like hope.

 

* *

 

For reasons unbeknownst to him, Gerard keeps count. By the third day, that face is still stamped behind his eyelids but very much out of his reach, teasing him almost with those quirked lips and mischievous eyes. A slight sense of frustration creeps up his spine, and it’s such a foreign feeling, so different from monochrome apathy. Some distant part of his mind reminds himself that he is safe in disinterest, but for once he feels ready to take a wild leap into the unknown. He’s gone to such lengths of brooding on the topic, he’s started to make a habit of drawing the taunting face on some sheet he grabs from the in-out tray, although he soon ceased when he realised how out of place the beautiful face looks on an email print-out.

He is vaguely reminded of a young, love-drunk sailor pursuing a siren of the faraway turbulent seas… it hasn’t turned out to be a hopeless pursuit as yet, but it sure is reckless and this mere fact makes it all the more exhilarating.

A knock on the door of his office snaps him out of blatant daydreaming, and he puts these nagging thoughts of the nameless face to the back of his mind until he leaves work.

Back at the apartment, the thoughts no longer stay contained within the confines of his head. He longs to cast them onto paper in the form of colours and ink and maybe even words, but not surprisingly, he’s lost his art supplies to time as well. On a whim, he redresses himself, donning a winter-coat without even giving it two glances. He is out the door with nothing but his phone and his wallet, and in the blink of an eye, he is at the nearest stationery store. It barely passes his mind, what he is doing, but the next moment he’s already running back to his apartment with a box of paints, a box of Copic markers, a box of sketching pencils and a brand new sketchbook.

When he flips through the blank pages of the sketchbook, he’s engulfed by a not-unfamiliar hunger to fill the pages. It feels strangely like coming home.

The nameless face takes on a fuller form once he puts pencils and markers to paper. It just flows out, the lines and hues, albeit a little crooked and mismatched – a result of his innate talents that are dusty from years of disuse, from being shelved too long. But it was overall an insurmountable feeling, and he cannot believe he’s gone so long without creating something. He’s been a fish trying to breathe without water, a man trying to live without air. He’s been an idiot.

He eyes the improved sketch before him, and realises the face actually belongs to a young man, with short dark hair. He flips through his memories like an archive, trying to locate an instance in his life where he’s met the young man somewhere, but there is none. And yet, it feels like he knows the name of this man, and he can almost feel it on the tip of his tongue. He shakes his head and places the finished sketch on his desk and heads to bed.

He wakes up with the man’s name on his lips. _Frank._ Frank is what the curious, doll-like creature’s called, and Gerard feels an uplifting surge of relief flood his chest, chase away his frown and leave behind a smile across his face. Just a small, guileless thing, the smile, but it’s a start.

Small steps, but it’s better than nothing.

 

* *

 

“Who’s Frank?”

Mikey asks Gerard the next time he visits his apartment, after Gerard explained that the face in the sketches scattered around the place is a boy he knows as Frank. He can’t really explain it with anything save that he met the mystery boy in dreams, but he does so with a secretive smile, and he knows Mikey is more relieved that Gerard is happy than he is worried that his brother has finally lost his mind.

 

* *

 

Now, when Gerard sits down at his dining table for two with a single cup of coffee, he yearns for Frank to be sat at the other end, smiling back at him with boyish mischief.

 

* *

 

Slowly, Gerard’s sketchbook becomes an album of Frank, captured in sketches from all angles. Gerard is a man obsessed, a love-drunk sailor indeed, and he is so, so lost at sea. But so long as he doesn’t fall out of this state of euphoria, he’s okay with it.

Because he smiles now, and his colleagues all ask him what major change happened in his life. Nothing, there’s nothing, Gerard tells them, because they won’t ever understand.

Gerard’s also thought about it a lot, why he’s so drawn to Frank, and he realizes it’s because Frank’s entirely different from the usual crowd Gerard is used to. He’s not predictable monochrome attires, not routine morning papers and coffee rings, not artificial lip-gloss smiles and best manicure in the city. Frank is everything Gerard could ever hope to have in his life, and Gerard is the moth to Frank’s flame.

That makes Gerard think of taking leave sometimes, just walk out of this comfortable little world he’s holed himself into, where he knows where everything goes and how things work, and just disappear. And maybe take the first job he gets landed in some faraway town where he’s just another blip on the radar. But he needs not to see Frank from afar in his dreams.

 

* *

 

_Gerard?_

Frank is looking down at him from the door of his room, his perfectly carved eyebrows slightly posed in a questioning frown. Gerard feels his chest give a little kick. Frank is so beautiful, ethereal almost when he’s bathed in moonlight. And he is finally attempting to communicate with Gerard. Something that tastes like reverence engulfs Gerard a bit, and all he can do is stare back at Frank dazedly.

_Come away with me for a while._

A small smile, and Gerard really can’t say no. He follows the boy out of the apartment. In the next moment, they are walking down the promenade by Hudson River. Gerard stops when Frank stops.

“I think of you all the time.” Gerard whispers after a while, barely audible.

 _I know._ Frank dons a knowing smile, and Gerard feels awed by his mere presence.

Comfortable silence settles over them like a spell. It may have been hours before Gerard speaks again.

“Thank you for being my inspiration.”

 _I’m just a character you dreamt of, Gerard. But you’re welcome._ There’s amusement in Frank’s voice, and Gerard doesn’t really understand, but he doesn’t question it. He vaguely feels the need to protest; Frank is not just a character, he is Gerard’s everything. But none of this makes their way out of Gerard’s mouth.

 _Look._ Frank nods his head towards the horizons sewing the edge of the river to the edge of the sky, where the sun appears to rise, chasing away the last traces of the night. It grows and grows, until the waves of light starts lapping at the railings, crashing over them and washing Gerard away. He shuts his eyes tight, and opens his eyes to the blank ceilings of his room. He is lying on his back on the bed again.

But he knows what Frank sounds like now – like the crunch of dry leaves in autumn, or the crisp morning air of False Spring, and Gerard can’t help but let slip a smile as he muses all this.

 

* *

 

Mikey doesn’t think it’s healthy for Gerard to spend his hours dwelling on a character that only exists in drawings and dreams, but Gerard won’t have it. He was right about none of them understanding it; he just didn’t think Mikey would be one of ‘them’, too.

Gerard feels the corners of his mouth turn down in a slight frown. Mikey wasn’t supposed to be another inhibition.

 

* *

 

Winter gives way to Spring much too soon, and Valentine’s Day creeps upon Gerard without a sound. He’s still alone, and he’s still miserable. He shuts himself in the apartment as usual, and he doesn’t just want a character he can barely talk to let alone touch now. He wants more. He wants a friend. He wants a lover.

He sinks eleven levels lower into his slump, and he spends the day staring at his walls filled with fifty different drawings of Frank, wishing for the impossible.

In a more lucid moment of his love-struck stupor, Gerard finds himself painting a life-size portrait of Frank. Layers and layers of acrylic on blank canvas, and by some sort of miracle, Gerard manages to recreate a life-like Frank before him. Realistic as it is, there’s still something missing about it, something lacking in his eyes, something lacking in his countenance. The unpolluted delight, good-natured mischief and honesty… They’re missing. But no matter how much Gerard tries to rectify the painting, his efforts go to waste. By the tenth try, Gerard ceases, understanding that perhaps even the best hyperrealist painter out there will not do justice to Frank’s figure.

He leaves the painting by the bedroom window and sleeps.

 

* *

 

On some other plane of existence, Gerard Way is a tightrope walker with barely a dollar to his name, and he is happy that way. Life is always balanced on the thin wire, on the brink between falling and flying, and nothing holds him down.

_Why don’t you do just that?_

“What, fly?” Gerard pauses, his arm half raised between grabbing the bottle of red wine and bringing it to his lips. No one drinks themselves into oblivion with red wine – that shit’s for romantic night-outs and pretentious business parties – but that’s all Gerard has at home. Some client or another gave it to him once.

 _Yeah, what’s holding you back?_ Frank looks genuinely puzzled as Gerard explains to him the restraints posed by work and expectations, how they hold him down like anchors he only wishes he can shrug off and not look back.

That’s when Gerard realises – there is really nothing holding him back. He’s never been the type to spend his wages on parties and Lamborghini’s. Booking the next available flight doesn’t sound like something out of a fairytale, somehow.

But then he steals another glance at the ageless man next to him, who’s staring at his own toes with exaggerated fascination, and he’s so above and untouched by the evils of the world, that Gerard feels a sharp pang of panic in his chest at the thought of going anywhere without Frank. He’s falling deeper and deeper by the second; what he’s feeling is far beyond schoolboy infatuation, he’s sure of it, and he can’t get out – _won’t_ get out of it before he makes Frank _real_.

But Frank is still intangible as ever, intangible like the last wisps of a dream fast dissipating in the beginnings of mornings, and Gerard doesn’t have a single clue as to where to begin to pull the boy into reality.

 _So don’t._ Frank’s hiding a smile, and his eyes are telling. Gerard isn’t aware he’s spoken his thoughts out loud. _There’s an easier way, and you know it. You just have to believe it._

And then Frank walks forward, steps close enough for Gerard to touch, and every thought, every word that’s ever been conceived gets caught in his throat. There’s a glitch in time, the moment frozen and prolonged as if it were a tableau, when Frank leans closer and closer until – there’s a puff of warm breath against the contours of his ear, it sends a thrill down Gerard’s spine, and he halts his breath.

_You’re almost there._

Pulling back – there’s an easy smile, and then he’s gone in another flash.

 

* *

 

There’s a heady rush of near-elation in his veins tonight, and he feels almost invincible in everything he does. He waltzes through the apartment, and eying the abandoned life-size portrait of Frank, he knows exactly what minute details it’s missing now. In between dipping his brush into paint cans and bringing them to the canvas’s surface in careful little staccatos, he begins to understand. When he’s done, and the canvas almost dried again, he hangs it up in his bedroom wall. The painting looks ready for something more, Frank looking like he may step out of it any moment and ask Gerard to come along in that sweet crisp-morning-air voice of his.

 _You’re almost there._ And Gerard believes it.

 

* *

 

“Thanks for coming.” “Leaving already? Tell your brother I said hi.” “Well guess I’ll see you on Monday!”

All the voices blur into one and the night’s only just beginning, but he can no longer tell these familiar faces apart from one another, all blending into nothing but one friendly countenance that could’ve been stranger than a stranger’s. Gerard excuses himself with the reason of not feeling well, and it’s perhaps the most honest thing he’s said in years.

But when Gerard closes the door behind him on the mundane world of rinse-lather-repeat and monochrome suits and handshakes, a smile graces his face like it never has before. Keys on the table, muffled footfalls on the wooden floorboards, coffee pot turned on, and Gerard doesn’t feel lonely anymore when he sits down at the table for two with a mug of coffee.

Across the table, Frank could be the shadow smiling at Gerard and drinking out of his mug of coffee.

The clock strikes twelve, midnight, and somehow the coffee doesn’t seem important anymore. He’s no Cinderella, hasn’t got any glass slipper to lose, and he rises from the table without hesitation. There are colours, bleeding across the floorboards, erupting  from corners of the walls and the Frank drawings become secondary. The ceiling could be raining plasters, the furniture imploding into a thousand-million pieces of apocalypse  and all Gerard will know is the thought inside his head: follow the colours, and it’s stronger than a command, strong like whiskey for the mind, and Gerard has never been more alive.

It’s a continuous stream of all the dreams he’s ever had, and yet Gerard will remember each beat of his heart against his ribcage, every touch of the wooden floorboards against his socked feet as he nears his destination. The bedroom door. Hand hovers above the knob, golden brass intimidating and daring Gerard to yank the door open any time and –

It all clicks into place. Inked lines have risen off of the canvas, the painted hues and shades now solid flesh and pretty bones. Porcelain skin, button nose, painted eyebrows and innocent eyes; the answer stands before him in plain t-shirt and chino shorts, and Gerard knows.

He takes quieter steps, edges closer, afraid to scare off the person like a graceless monster may when approaching a baby deer, but the person raises his head with a beckoning smile, and Gerard goes, boneless and completely obliging.

Desperate hands fall on short waist like the reverent and devout seeking salvation, frantic eyes look for the liquid gold of the widest eyes, and Frank doesn’t even need to ask the question. Of course Gerard will come with him, anytime, _always_ , but there’s a cold finger on his barely-parted lips and he swallows all his pleas and prayers. A nod is all that suffices.

A kiss cool as raindrops, and he’s falling, helpless and uncontrollable, into pools of bottomless amber and gold. It’s gone as soon as it happens, but it is with this promise of eternity on his lips that Gerard steps forward. He gives Frank both his hands, unthinking, but there are no room for regrets or doubts. Gerard trusts him. And the lull of the boy’s half-moon smile is the last thing Gerard sees before all he's known unwind, disintegrate like pictures turned nonsensical static, come apart like the last echoes of a requiem in the seams of dark dark silence. Not to stay imprisoned by a failing empire, he follows. He walks forward in the wake of Frank's footfalls, and it’s venturing into unknown ink-woven roads, but he’s not lost or afraid, not with his hand in Frank’s. Flat surfaces and blooming colours is his new mother-tongue, and everything, everything makes perfect sense to him.

Frank is there with him, riding watercolour tides with pastel skies overhead. They are lovers swimming deeper into these soothing folds of water, and there’s no reason for Gerard to hold back a full-blown smile anymore. He’s found home.

He is a dreamer, a writer, an artist, and this is how Gerard Way disappears.

 

* *

 

“You said he left the party an hour ago?”

“Yes. He said he wasn’t feeling well.”

What Mikey doesn’t know is that the fastest ride in the city won’t change anything. All he will find is an empty apartment and the life-size portrait of Frank, dead eyes and forever smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading. :) If you liked this fic, why not check out my other fics as well? x


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